Challenges of a CLIL teacher

General teaching challenges that teachers may face

Make yourself and content understandable: Students have different learning styles, and it is more than possible that you as a teacher have to face different ways of learning in a class, since usually there are more than 25 students in a class. When explaining something or doing an activity, the teacher has to bear in mind that s/he has to get to all the students, so s/he has to do in in different ways, always thinking in possible different perspectives.

Be creative and innovative: Children have become accustomed to new technologies and are always eager to learn new skills. Thus, teachers have the task to come with new resources, new ideas for the projects and ways to keep them engaged in their own learning. Presenting new and striking tools and materials helps capturing their attention to keep going further in their learning.

Getting to know your students and adapt to their needs: Year after year, all the students develop new skills, interests and needs, so regardless you have the same students from the last year, you have to ensure that you get to know them well. It is always important to know the children whom you are going to work with.

Keep your class in control: A teacher has to figure out how to deal with disruptive students, cope with arguments by listening to both sides and calm down a whole class when it is necessary It is one of the biggest challenges a teacher has to deal with, but it should be on a day-to-day basis, set a good learning environment from the beginning.

Provide real-context activities and experiences: Provide contextualised activities is just as important as the content itself you are teaching. Moreover, it is also important the classroom organization, since the typical teacher-fronted one, with the students setting in rows facing the teacher, does not create a good communicative environment and lack the chances to share ideas or negotiate meaning with each other —and that is how real life works. In other words, the transfer of learning has to be possible, that is, a student should be able to apply what s/he has learned in a particular situation to another in a different context.

Specific challenges of applying a CLIL methodology

Give the same importance to language and content: In CLIL lessons, in which subjects are taught through a foreign language, we create situations with dual-focused aims, that is, we want our students to learn content and simultaneously learn a foreing language, English in our case. So, we as teachers have to keep in mind that we want to impart a dual-focused teaching, and our main objectives will be both language and content.

Scaffolding and rich activities: Scaffolding is an important part of regular education, but its use is even more important in a language learning environment like CLIL education. Supporting your students during their learning and gradually remove that support as they become more independent is so important when teaching in a foreign language.

Adjust your methodology: It is so important for a CLIL teacher to make him/herself understood, ensure that students understand the content, and that is not easy at all. Teachers cannot simply transmit the content as they would do in L1, assuming that students will understand what they want to transmit.

Redused use of L1: The teacher cannot simply tell students the words they do not understand in the L1, because it would not be any learning there. In CLIL lessons, the important part students learn of the language is focused on the subject matter they are doing. That is why fluency becomes more important than accuracy, and errors made from the students are a natural part of the language learning.

Engage students: In CLIL lessons, students discover a hunger to learn a language, since they actually need using the language to learn. So teachers must take advantage of that hunger they might feel to create rich learning situations and engage their students to that new type of learning methodology.